Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @07:39PM
from the complete-with-ballmer-bot dept.

Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.

It's fairly simple to scale Linux to 200,000 machines. It can boot and run from the network. No local storage and crucially NO LOCAL STATE required. You can boot a ramdisk over the LAN and run from that if you want. What this means is you only need a few people to run thousands of machines. It's a log increase. That is, Linux isn't your big problem when running 200,000 machines. Your big problem is space, racking, networking, AC, power etc.

On the other hand, Windows pretty much has to be installed onto a hard disk. This means there are thousands of configuration settings, hundreds of libraries of specific versions which all have to be kept synchronized on tens or hundreds of thousands of hard disks. This is a fucking nightmare once you get past a few dozens of machines never mind 200,000. There is at least a linear increase in admin effort with increasing numbers of machines, and with that increase goes cost. Active Directory and Ghost are pretty much de rigueur but don't really fix the problem. Notice that Ghost isn't even an MS product, but a bandaid to fix something the OS can't do (Yes, I'm aware of the MS deployment add ons).

The problem is location of state; on 200,000 hard disks or 1 boot server. Simple maths. Basically, Windows will have to be redesigned so that it can boot and run over the LAN or from a ramdisk or whatever. That's the point when it really becomes "Enterprise ready" rather than being a pretender.

For those who missed it, this is a quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski, one of the most notable Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today, and memorable for attending anti-trust court proceedings against Microsoft sporting a colored mohawk and wearing army boots - a true cyberpunk.

Also, Jamie's version is "Linux is only free if your time has no value";)

What got your panties in a twist? My guess it that you just don't like punk. And here I thought the majority on/. looked beyond outward appearances but calling him a clown seems to have got you mods so perhaps I was wrong.Breaking down his qualities as a cyberpunk:

Cyber: "Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today..." obviously not into computers, so I can really see where you're going here...

punk: Multicolored mohawk and combat boots, classic punk. On noes! Only if h

... because apparently my patience for bullshit is even shorter than yours.

Props to Bill Gates and his company Microsoft, and his business strategies, which served to DRIVE software and hardware innovation for so many years, literally making the computing world what it is today.

Smelly farts (actually, big piles of shit) to Bill Gates and Microsoft, and his business strategies, for what they have done to the computing world and the market(s) AFTER they reached the top -- about the last 10 or 12 years -- and helping far too much to make the computing world what it is today.

I am referring to the underhanded monopolistic practices, the illegal deals, the stifling of innovation in the name of profits, and more... I could go on for a while. Hell, even just within the last year they were caught buying votes on an international standards question, and that is hardly the tip of their list of recent misdeeds.

So, yeah. Bill Gates has done these industries (computing in general: hardware, software, and even theory) some tremendous good. (Not favors... his motives were completely selfish... but good.) And then, when he was in a position to do even more good, to drive the industry farther... he took the selfish route instead and did the opposite.

20 years ago, I would have called Bill Gates a hero. And he deserved the title. Today, I would call Bill Gates a villain, and he has well earned the title. I can't wait to see him leave.

Don't mistake Bill Gates for Steve Ballmer. Bill remained the vocal/public figure for a long time BUT remember that he was NOT the CEO, business leader, etc... Again, please, don't mistake Bill for Steve nor Microsoft (as it is today). Hate the company and their practices but, as for Bill, I honestly don't see much justification in hating him.

Props to Bill Gates and his company Microsoft, and his business strategies, which served to DRIVE software and hardware innovation for so many years

I'd say it's the opposite. Software and hardware innovation were driven by the market to new heights in the eighties, not seen before and not seen after. Innovation was when a seemingly endless stream of 8-bit and 16-bit computers were on the market, battling it out. Innovation was the ZX Spectrum, the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga.

Wintel was THE DEATH of all that. With Wintel taking over the market in the nineties, competitive innovation was pushed out, and technological innovation has been hold back by the realities of financial and marketing forces ever since. In state of technology cycles, it was no longer important what could be done and how fast, but whether the previous cycle could still be financially leeched or had been excausted to such extend there should be innovation towards a new cycle.

Hardly. Wintel was just the dominant brand of processor, we've not exactly been stuck with old single-core 486sx25 chips on ISA-bus mobos with 4Mb RAM now have we.No, MS software has driven increased hardware power due to its ever-increasing demands. As graphics were given more dominance in the OS, so graphics hardware got better to satisfy demand from consumers. The same applies to buses, RAM, networking, displays and storage all the way to better webcams.

i hate to point this out but linux is almost as old as windows. and definitely older than any form of windows that was semi usable.

Open Office was star office, which was based off an older product, but in the end the spreadsheet was based off of lotus 123 older than both.

MSFT doesn't innovate, they let other people come up with good ideas and then implement it themselves poorly. or as the saying goes MSFT reinventing unix poorly for 25 years. While there are time when MSFT has been ahead in some departments. the infamous database filesystem(now winFS) was started because of the database filesystem BeFS way back in the mid 90's.

Have you ever met him, listened to him speak in "private" or the likes?

Not that it's relevant, but have you?

Bill never really ran Microsoft, he was too much an idealist for business at that end.

He did, however, put himself in a position where he could easily make decisions. In fact, he was CEO for awhile, right? That's essentially a position where your whole fucking job is making decisions. He's got, what, a hundred billion dollars for doing absolutely nothing?

His "business strategy" that I mentioned earlier was putting low cost PCs into the hands of the masses so that he could offer a universal system.

That may have been the goal, if you believe him. I certainly can't deny that the way in which Microsoft screwed IBM early on was of benefit to everyone, in terms of how cheap hardware is now.

But that does not excuse what he, and Microsoft, have done before and since.

From what I remember, Microsoft's very first product was Altair BASIC. [wikipedia.org] The reason they got the contract with Altair was a classic (perhaps the first?) example of vaporware:

Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[5] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter.

Keep in mind, this was when Microsoft was Micro-Soft, a two-person company. Your argument that he "never really ran Microsoft" is not an excuse here -- he made the phone call, and he helped develop the software, with exactly one other person.

It warms my "zealot" heart to know that Microsoft was, quite literally, founded on a lie.

His DREAM was one of oneness. His ideal wasn't "open source" but one of "openly available to all who wanted to partake in the scene."

For a small fee. He was certainly against sharing, and demonstrated very early on a complete lack of understanding of the free software community (this was before the term "open source") -- read "An open letter to hobbyists." [blinkenlights.com]

Oh, and... if his dream was of openness, why didn't the Bill&Melinda foundation donate to OLPC?

Bill Gates is fundamentally coupled to Microsoft. He at least tolerated its current and past strategy. Saying he is not responsible for what MS does is naive. And if he gives a different impression when you meet him in private, that just makes hom either a good actor or deluded. Incidentially, I hear that some historic mass-murderers gave the impression of being pretty nice people.

Bill Gates did not put low cost PC's into the hands of the masses. IBM did that and it would have done it without Microsoft. Without MS they would incidentially have offered a better product as the competition was technologically superiour (yes, I have used both).

The main thing Bill did was to create, aquire and push mediocte technology on everybopdy and to ignore the state of the art, thereby slowing innovation sgnificantly. My beef is not with MS marketing. These people are scum almost anywhere. My beef is with the appalinbgly low quality of the MS ''OSes'' and ''productivity software'' and the inordinate amount of time beging wasted, when alternative approaches, that work better, are available. If you want easy, look to Apple. If you want powerful and cheap, look to Linux. If you want reliable, look to both. If you want slow, unreliable, expensive, unintuitive, complex to operate, full of stupid design decision in the presence of better alternatives, look to MS productes and Bill Gates was involved with these bad design decisions. With regard to technology, Bill Gates is, at best, a mediocre engineer with a hugely inflate ego, that is unaware of his true skill level. He will not be missed and his era has lasted far to long.

In all seriousness though - I think Bill got all he can get out of MSFT... the company is far from dead, but it ain't exactly the powerhouse it once was, when OEMs and most software devs trembled at the sound of the phrase: "Microsoft has announced that..."

The best time to leave is when your baby is still (in)famous, and strong enough to almost do whatever it pleases. Besides, once the public at large realizes that MSFT is indeed sliding downhill, they'll more easily blame Ballmer for it than they would even think to blame Bill, which leaves Bill's legacy intact.

From here on out, any further news will be tacked onto Ballmer's reputation, both inside and outside the tech community (even though most of us in the tech community already know who to blame/praise --depending on your viewpoint).

I think the main point of failure was on the creative side of things. How do you knowingly continue to claim individuality after you've become a trend-follower instead of a trend-setter?? Even the managed services thing comes about a year after IBM already deployed a similar solution.

And to stay on topic - Microsoft plays catch up in a lot of areas, but from what I hear their research divisions still put out some pretty neat stuff, some of which actually making it into their future products. Unfortunately (for the really neat stuff) most of their products are still encumbered by these giant backwards-compatibility or easy marketability things, or at the very least the illusion of them. These are also coincidently a large part of why so many people and companies still buy and use their products - compatibility with the status quo plus incremental upgrades.

Their developer tools tend to be less encumbered by this don't-disturb-the-status-quo thing, which is why they tend to rock - but these have another downside - then you generally end up tied to Microsoft platforms, which allows them to preserve keep selling their software and your software to continue to run in backwards-compatible mode on everyone's desktop without as much as being recompiled for a decade or so. Funny, huh?

At the time of that article, they hold $28,900,000,000 in cash reserves. In terms of gross domestic product, that puts Microsoft's cash reserves 80th (out of 180 sovereign nations) when compared worldwide to yearly GDP. (wikipedia). And it's only dropped to that level because Microsoft, after it won all the antitrust battles, instituted a stock buy-back.

If Microsoft were to never, ever sell another product or acquire a business or accept a licensing fee, and simply put that money into a money market account at a bank pulling 8% interest, they would make 2,300,000,000 yearly. Wikipedia lists Microsoft as having 79,000 employees. Just with the interest they could make without any strategic investing, they could pay each employee at the company $30,000 a year. For nothing. Before the stock buyback, that number was around $70,000.

Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.

That's how "not in trouble" Microsoft is. Microsoft is still a powerhouse, and they're quite unconcerned that you think they aren't. Microsoft is not in danger.

Nobody said anything about Microsoft going bankrupt. The fact is that they are slowly losing their stranglehold on the personal desktop market. Whether or not they can survive financially is irrelevant.

Mou misunderstand. MS is definitely solvent. That's not the point. MS is definitely not quite the powerhouse it once was in terms of sheer market influence. Perception has definitely turned against MS and all the money in the world won't change that. Remember that IBM is still a huge, very successful company and still very much "Big Blue." But no one would argue they control the PC (or general computer) market like they once did. MS does still have a monopoly in the area of OEM desktop OS's and Office suites, but that hold on the market is weakening. This doesn't mean that MS will go bankrupt by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact that Microsoft is wealthier than my country is not in question. They have a shitload of money, but they no longer wield the kind of influence and strike the kind of fear into the hearts of competitors as they once were able. Paul Graham put it very well in this article [paulgraham.com].

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indire

Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.

You obviously haven't shopped for real estate in Seattle lately. 70k is a paupers salary in Seattle. The three bedroom, 1900 sq ft house across the street from me in sleepy Ballard just went for 700k. Which means you need a 140k down payment and a combined income of around 186k to qualify.

But I think the real point is not that Microsoft is going bankrupt any time soon. Simply that they are going the same route as IBM. Once IBM was the 800 pound gorilla and you played their game or got crushed. Then MS played that role for a while.

I don't expect Microsoft to *increase* market in their core profitable businesses (win32, office), and so far they have failed to show an ability to innovate in any new markets (Zune) or be profitable in those markets (XBox).

Even after IBM lost the crown, they were still mostly profitable, and eventually MS will go in the same direction as IBM as a more services oriented business.

But the only innovation that will be seen coming out of Redmond is the steady bleed of the better talent to more lucrative startups.

For any really good programmer in Seattle, the pecking order of where you want to work is:

- Working for a startup that could be sold to Google.- Working for a startup that could be sold to MS.- Working at Google.- Working anywhere.- Working at Amazon.- Working at Real Networks.- Working at Microsoft.

With regards to your pecking order, working at Google is a joke. They offer you a "pauper's salary" (typically half of what the market rate is for your position) with little to no stock options, and tons of benefits whose sole purpose is to keep you at work or working on a Google project longer.

I enjoy using some of their products, but you'd be a fool to work for them if you have a family to support or live in a real estate market that actually requires a decent salary.

You seem to have forgotten that Microsoft is a public company, with shareholders. They can't sit back and live on the interest from their cash stockpile.

Here's something to think about - Microsoft's cash assets have decreased by more than half in four years. Apple's cash assets are increasing rapidly, and are now nearly equal to Microsoft's. Would you care to apply your logic to Apple?

Step 4 - Wrap up everything DOS/Win32 into a virtual machine and move forward with a clean slate while still supporting the gargantuan DOS/Win32 legacy code out there

That would be a fatal mistake. Well, the win32 part - 16 bit DOS apps don't run at all on 64-bit Windows. Win32 is simple and it works, and hasn't changed much in over a decade. It's the stable API you can really code against. It's not object oriented, but it's just not that hard to wrap it.

Win32 is often confused with the steaming pile of MS APIs on top of it: MFC, COM, etc. Those indeed need to be exiled to a virtualization layer..NET is the attempt to introduce a new layer to replace MFC, COM, etc. The problem is, it isn't a useful replacement for win32, and you really need to be able to code against win32 from time to time (and of course.NET is built on top of win32, it's not technically a replacement for it).

MS has started their decline, just like IBM did before them. Even if they recruit the greatest CEO in the world, all he can do is stabilize them and maybe get 3-5% annual growth.

The question is though, is there a Lou Gerstner-level of executive talent out there who can turn Microsoft into an effective development organization? I don't think there is.

All that Ballmer is going to do is continue to piss away shareholders' money on his ego trip of the month club. He's desperate to show that MS's dominance isn't just from the sheer luck of catching IBM's fumble.

If it's your contention that Microsoft doesn't have legions of raving loon fanboys (we call them Mouse Clicking Solutions Experts) that are completely ignorant of the damage Microsoft has done to personal computing, you are fooling yourself.
If another of your contention is that there are many people on Slashdot who are not emotionally involved in their machines or technology in general, you are delusional.

An outage in a data center over about 2.2MW is a major hassle to re-start. Over about 5MW can be a 48 hour effort. When you get into these 20+ MW facilities, it can easily take weeks to get everything back up and running.

When a facility is properly compartmentalized, it isn't nearly as bad-- redundancies and fail-over mechanisms can continue to maintain most of the system operation, and hopefully extra load can be shifted to another site.

The problem is that historically data centers don't have fires. (In contrast, telco switch facilities have them all the time.) Electrically when we get over about 10-20MW of UPS in a single structure data center, the complexity of systems and maintenance provisions greatly increases the risk of fire. From a raised floor perspective, when we get over 20kW per rack, we have seen a couple small fires (out of thousands-- don't get me wrong, it isn't a huge widespread problem). With these changes brought on by the "mega-centers," it takes a lot to improve (electrical) reliability for the site.

So, in my book, it isn't the fact that you shouldn't be prepared for a data center to go down some times, it is that there is more concentration of facilities and they are being done at a larger scale which will impact the reliability in a major way. We advise most of our clients to keep under 6MW for a data center, and go for multiple facilities geographically isolated for the extra capacity. That approach isn't always commercially viable, but it is makes for a better long-term investment.

Forgive me my ignorance (I'm a developer which necessarily equates to a crappy admin), but when you say that it takes a long time to get everything back up and running, you mean that you have to stagger the cold boots, right? I just lost a power supply on my SATA RAID box last week. OK, so I admin by proxy when I need a box for my source code... I had bought what I thought was a reasonably sized power supply, with what I knew about power supplies from a few years ago when I did LAN party thing in high scho

This can only reinforce my belief that the people at Microsoft have no ideas and no vision (whether they lost them or never had them to begin with, I'll leave to you) whatsoever. It almost makes me feel sorry for them to see them try so very hard to innovate. But ultimately they're just like the Chinese knock-off game console manufacturers, they see new products that are commercial successes and emulate them in every way but the one that counts. I liked Windows 2000, and I like Windows XP. Microsoft should stick to what they do best, not try to create the "next big thing".

[Gates] welcomed onto the stage a Ph.D. candidate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the "Ballmer-bot," a robot made to imitate and act like Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and Gates' long-time business partner, who is not attending TechEd.

"Developers, developers, developers, developers," the robot, developed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio product, repeated over and over, in an homage to Ballmer's famous rant. The robot also raised his arm, showing how he has the ability to "throw eggs," according to the MIT student controlling his movements.

Ah... microsoft's mentality, you gotta love it. When he says "we havent thought about that size before", he wants to convey "we, humanity".

Doesnt that kind of show what kind of reality distortion field this guy lives in?

Amazon thought about it, Google thought about it. Ah, they are not "we, humanity"... i see.

Actually, I read it as a genuinely humble admission that Microsoft has never thought about data centers the size that Google and Amazon have. I read it as a genuine admission of his company's short comings and a challenge for his company to rise to that challenge. Admittedly he stops short of saying... "we haven't thought about that size before. Like Google and Amazon have."

The last bit I read as a desire to be able to compete with the larger data centers. Recognizing that Microsoft today is not one of the companies with a large reliable data center on the scale of Google.

A good commentator would have mentioned that, pointed it out as a sign of weakness, and seen Gate's parting challenge to his company as a "moon shot" type of declaration.

So we are returning to the very thing Microsoft fought to eliminate in the first place. Big data centers where you lease CPU time and have nothing but a terminal at your desk. ( ok, so its slightly different in actual practice, but same basic principles )

McNealy, jackass that he may be, made some comment in a speech a while back about technology moving in a pendulum fashion.

computing machinery goes back and forth between local access ( abandoned pdp-11 in your local lab, PC, etc ) and the network is the computer ( university's central VAX with a bunch of terminals, google apps, etc )

For those who couldn't sit through the 80-minute video [microsoft.com] (or don't have Silverlight), Gates said that in the future Microsoft's mega data centers will have many millions of servers" [datacenterknowledge.com]. It currently has "hundreds of thousands" of servers, but expects to pack up to 300,000 into its new Chicago container farm. Gates also predicted that only a select number of companies (presumably including Microsoft and Google) will be able to compete on this scale.

For those who couldn't sit through the 80-minute video [microsoft.com] (or don't have Silverlight), Gates said that in the future Microsoft's mega data centers will have many millions of servers" [datacenterknowledge.com]. It currently has "hundreds of thousands" of servers, but expects to pack up to 300,000 into its new Chicago container farm. Gates also predicted that only a select number of companies (presumably including Microsoft and Google) will be able to compete on this scale.

Which is a "moon shot" style parting gesture. It's aiming squarely at Google and saying "we can not allow a server gap!" In a way this is a back-handed admission that Microsoft has totally missed it in the "data center race" and needs to catch up. It's as if Google (continuing my space race analogy) has done everything but land on the moon and Gates has just challenged his company to do just that.

Once Microsoft hits the million server mark and celebrates the world's largest data center... it will probably

If Microsoft is moving into the hosted application space, that must mean the rest of the technology world is already there and will be ready to move on by the time Microsoft can field any online services...that will still require IE and Office to be installed on the client.

Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding. I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. I *wish* I had the left hemisphere brain activity he did. But you can only GET that activity if the passion to do it drives you.

For that, I applaud Bill Gates, as he is like many of us - he's passionate about technology.

Business is a completely different arena, and we all know that big business eventually corrupts - that isn't most directly Bill's fault - he's just a bad business man, in that sense.

I use Linux every day. I absolutely HATE Windows (and most other Microsoft) products. I hate them with a passion. I avidly try to get as many people using Linux as I can - my grandma, my wife's friends, you name it. That doesn't mean Bill Gates wasn't revolutionary and awesome because his drive was to create software. If it were all him coding Windows, 100%, you'd have to admit it'd probably be a lot better than it is today. Too many chefs in the kitchen just burns things when the ultimate goal is profit.

I dunno, I just thought I'd throw that into a whole ocean full of flames toward someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st.

Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding.

And you take that knowledge from what source?

One of Bill's very first public appearance was his "open letter" where he showed a great passion for money and business, and very little for software and coding.

I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then.

Your probably can, if you are studying computer science. Even back then, it wasn't rocket science. A lot of people wrote similar stuff. But most of them didn't have the connections, rich parents, or greed to turn it into a successful business.

You've got this guy absolutely backwards.

someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st.

He's considered them thieves for at least 20 years. I see no indication of him changing his mind. If you have, name your source.

Ummm... actually Gates made MS a decent company, it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil". Now before they were just a software company that made crappy software, now we have MS as a software company that produces crappy software with DRM/Trusted Computing and just about everything else to make your computer become MS's and the government's computer (with a bit of it devoted to the *AA).

it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil".

I disagree. I noticed MS being evil with the introduction of Windows 95, when the then-standard Word Perfect oddly didn't seem to run properly under Windows. Shortly thereafter came MSN and the introduction of the free Internet Explorer and the beginnings of Netscape's death. That was several years before Ballmer entered the picture.

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

Sane? If the decision makers at MS were sane, chairs wouldn't get thrown, the ISO would not have tampered with, and there wouldn't be millions (or is it billions now?) of dollars worth of fines on them.

Indeed, IIRC they even had an internal slogan -- "it's not done til Lotus won't run", or something like that.

Which - even ignoring the utter lack of even the slightest actual evidence of this ever being true - would have sounded even dumber when it first surfaced back in the mid-80s than it does today. What sane OS vendor would lock out 90% of its potential customers by not running their primary application ?

A: An OS Vendor who's also trying to sell a competing software to said 90% of their potential customers.

Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run [proudlyserving.com]. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?

In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog [msdn.com]. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!

Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War [joelonsoftware.com]. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.

This is exactly how MS built the company into it megalithic existence. Lets see if we can name some software/companies that they killed off?

Digital Research, Word Perfect, Netscape, GEM, Paradox, oh screw it, we are all aware that the embrace and extend was MS speak for extinguish. There are products that never even made it to market thanks to MS (can you say tablet pc)

The point is that this is not flamebait. It counts as truthful comment.

I disagree. I noticed MS being evil with the introduction of Windows 95, when the then-standard Word Perfect oddly didn't seem to run properly under Windows.

Which wouldn't have had anything at all to do with the abominable implementations on Windows at all, right ?

Not to mention, when 1995 rolled around, Word Perfect was well on its way out (and with good reason). The aforementioned almost incomprehensibly bad Windows implementations had sealed its fate. By the time the first semi-decent version of Wordperfect for Windows was released in mid-1997, the game was well and truly over.

Shortly thereafter came MSN and the introduction of the free Internet Explorer and the beginnings of Netscape's death. That was several years before Ballmer entered the picture.

Indeed. Providing a free web browser - just like every other major platform of the day did - was the very embodiment of "evil".

Wordperfect and Navigator are textbook examples of bad products being displaced in the market by better ones (although the first few Wordperfect for Windows iterations were orders of magnitude worse than even Navigator 4.0).

it wasn't until he let the chair-thrower Steve Ballmer take over the company that MS started to become really "evil".

No, not really... MS was just as evil back then, they were just more covert about it.

What changed with Ballmer coming in as CEO was that they became more brash about it. Have you heard of the "frog in boiling water" experiment? Gates was like that - slowly turning up the heat, then before you realize it, you're cooked. Ballmer is more like, first boil the pot of water while cackling maniacally and pointing at you, then pour it directly on your head.

"DOS ain't done, til Lotus won't Run" was *well* known back in the 80's in my user group.

I call BS.

Everybody loves to trot out that phrase, but it's a complete myth. [proudlyserving.com]. Let me quote the relevant part of that link:

I first asked Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and his quote was "I've heard the stories over the years, but I don't have any specific recollection that there was a devious silent break of the kind you mentioned. I also have a bad memory." Kapor was kind enough to put me in touch with some old Lotus people he knew. And they all corroborated the story: "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I honestly don't think MS can do much to be innovative and maintain their position in the market. Take Apple as an example - a few years back they were gasping for breath with a very small market share. They didn't have all that much to lose, and so were able to make a break with something new (OSX) and come up with something different.

Now, to put that against MS....they achieved a mindboggling share of the PC market, and were able to rest on their laurels for years. Now, they face competitors in a number of areas - OS, browsers, office suites - and their success is also what cripples them. They can't make a break with their software past the way Apple did, because if they do, they suddenly lose the connection with their established market. Think about it - if new MS products differ too radically from their old ones, or are completely incompatible etc, then suddenly the barrier between them and Linux/Apple etc is lowered dramatically. If you have to learn a new OS, for example, then there's as much chance of someone buying a shiny new Mac or picking up that free OS the kids are talking about as picking up the new MS OS and learning how to use it, not to mention the fact that MS and bugs/insecurity are a common perception...

If you're going to play devil's advocate than you have to play up Microsoft's strengths. Say what you will about Office, but it dominates for reasons aside of lock-in.

And what about Surface [microsoft.com]? I'd like to see the folks at apple come up with something as cool as that. There is a *nix variant, but it's not nearly as cool. And no, the puny widdle scween on the iPhone dosen't count! Sure, the cost of a Surface unit would be prohibitive to average Joe User but people may re-respect Microsoft if they